1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer-based information organization, and more particularly to a method of displaying a collection of information in a three-dimensional form, and further displaying a path taken by a viewer in navigating through the collection of information. The method may be useful for multiple applications involving display of information, including platform management in heterogeneous systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
The following descriptions and examples are not admitted to be prior art by virtue of their inclusion within this section.
Increasing capability of computers, coupled with a proliferation of other information-based devices, including telephones, pagers, and personal digital assistants (PDA""s), have contributed to continually increasing amounts of available information. This large quantity of information can lead to difficulties in finding specific information, and particularly in finding the information conveniently and efficiently.
As an example, it can be difficult for a viewer accessing a piece of information to know how that information is related to other information available from the same source. The source of information may be, e.g., an application program or an Internet site (also called a xe2x80x9cWorld Wide Webxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cwebxe2x80x9d site). In other words, it can be difficult to tell what other information may be available, and how the information is intended to be organized by its developer. Current approaches to providing guidance to a consumer or viewer of information, which may be used on, e.g., web sites or application displays, include tables of contents or organizational trees. Such displays typically require a large amount of screen space, however, which may be particularly disadvantageous if the viewer is using a small-screen device such as a telephone or PDA. Other techniques, such as dividing displayed information into separate displays accessible using, for example, folder tabs along the top of a display window, don""t allow the viewer an overview of all of the available information at once.
Even if a consumer or viewer of information is aware of the intended organization of a collection of information, accessing a particular desired piece of information can still be difficult because a limited number of specific navigation paths through the information collection may be provided. For example, information on a web site is typically arranged in a hierarchical structure in which xe2x80x9cclickingxe2x80x9d upon multiple xe2x80x9clinksxe2x80x9d is required to reach a piece of information having the desired specificity or detail on the desired topic. This problem may be further exacerbated for a user of a small-display device, because only a small portion of the information intended to appear on a display screen may be viewable on the screen of the small-display device at any one time. Such limitations of the navigation pathways established by a developer of an application or web site may also make it difficult to move from one desired piece of information to another efficiently. For example, even remembering and/or retracing a path taken through a collection of information can present challenges. Although web browser programs often include a xe2x80x9chistoryxe2x80x9d, or listing of the most recent web pages visited, this history may be erased by accessing some web pages. Furthermore, the web page names listed in the history may not provide a sufficient description of the pages"" subject matter to convey a relationship between the path taken and the overall organization scheme of the information. Such a relationship may be observable by comparing the history to the organization of the web site, but this may require clicking back and forth between multiple web pages (thereby complicating the browser history further).
In view of the problems described above, it would be desirable to develop a method by which a consumer of information could quickly ascertain the intended organization of a collection of information. It would further be desirable to allow the consumer to easily observe a path taken through the collection of information in the context of its organization. In some cases, a method of allowing the consumer to establish criteria for organization of displayed information would be preferable, so that desired pieces of information may be more quickly accessible.
The problems outlined above are in large part addressed by methods described herein of configuring information for display and displaying information. The methods of configuring information involve arranging pieces of information, or information units, into ordered sequences, or continuum arrangements. Depending on the embodiment, an information unit may take various forms, including, for example, a value of a system or network variable being monitored by a system administrator for a computer system, an address (also called a Universal Resource Locator, or URL) of a web page provided by a web search application, or a portion of the material included in a web page. Criteria for ordering of the information units may include the level of detail of the subject matter of the information units, the degree to which the subject matter of an information unit is related to that of a reference information unit, and/or other criteria, which may be defined by either the consumer or the organizer of the information.
The arrangement of information units into one or more continuum arrangements typically involves assigning one or more continuum tags, or labels, to each information unit. Such labels are a form ofxe2x80x9cmeta-dataxe2x80x9d, or data about data. In particular, a label preferably corresponds to a particular attribute of the data, and the value of that attribute. The label is linked to the corresponding piece of data (or information unit as described herein). In a preferred embodiment, this linking is implemented by relating the label to a reference or pointer to the information unit, where the relating is done using some sort of data structure. xe2x80x9cData structurexe2x80x9d as used herein refers to a collection of pieces of data (which may be meta-data) and any relationships between the pieces of data. One such data structure may be a rules database which contains rules, or policy, for assigning the continuum labels to information units. xe2x80x9cPolicyxe2x80x9d as used herein refers to one or more rules established in advance of a particular situation or event to govern the response of a computer system to that event.
Establishing policy for arranging information units into continuum arrangements may be particularly useful in embodiments for which configuration of ad hoc information is desired. Ad hoc information refers to information generated or organized in response to a particular event or request, as opposed to static information which is always presented in the same form. Examples of ad hoc information include an alarm message generated in response to a failure detected in a monitored system, as might occur in a system administration application, or a list of URL""s provided by a search engine in response to specific search criteria given by a user. Ad hoc information units may therefore not exist in advance of a triggering event which gives rise to the ad hoc information. Setting policy for collection of such information units and assignment of labels to them after they are created therefore allows establishment of continuum arrangements even for ad hoc information units.
The assignment of continuum labels to establish a continuum arrangement of information units as described above may be done by directly entering labels into a data structure relating labels and information units, or into a rules database containing policy for assignment of labels to information units. Alternatively, establishment of one or more continuum arrangements may be performed using a graphical user interface (GUI). In such an embodiment, icons representing information units may be moved using a pointing device and arranged into sequences on a display screen. The information unit icons may be arranged with respect to an axis, pair of axes, or set of three axes configured on the display screen, thereby establishing one-dimensional, two-dimensional or three-dimensional configurations. In some embodiments, the sequences of information unit icons may also be formed without reference to an axis on the screen, or multiple one- or two-dimensional sequences may be entered to form a single three-dimensional configuration of information units. The configuration of icons may be entered into the computer system using the GUI, and assignment of labels to corresponding information units subsequently performed by one or more programs executable on the computer system, thereby establishing a configuration of the actual information units.
Configuration of information units for display using the methods described above may allow the information units to be displayed in a form which allows rapid, convenient viewer access to desired pieces of information. For example, in a method of displaying information contemplated herein, a set of three axes is configured on a viewer""s display screen. Selectable regions are configured in the vicinity of the set of axes, where each selectable region corresponds to an information unit. The position of the selectable region corresponding to an information unit with respect to the set of axes is determined by a set of coordinates proportional to values of x-axis, y-axis and z-axis continuum attributes (corresponding to x-axis, y-axis and z-axis continuum labels). Selection of one of the selectable regions (by using a pointing device, for example) causes the corresponding information unit to be displayed on the display screen. The axes and selectable regions are preferably retained on a portion of the display screen alongside the displayed information unit, and a current position icon illustrating the position of the selectable region corresponding to the displayed information unit is preferably displayed.
In some embodiments, other icons may be displayed in the vicinity of the set of axes, such as an intended starting point icon showing the starting point intended by the developer or organizer of the collection of information for navigating through the information. Other icons may also include a user starting point icon, showing the position corresponding to the information unit through which a viewer actually enters the collection of information, and an interim point icon showing the position corresponding to an information unit previously displayed. A path between a user starting point icon and a current position icon may also be displayed. Furthermore, a visible indication may be given when a pointer displayed on the screen is moved across one of the selectable regions and/or one of the axes. The visible indication may be, for example, a word descriptive of the subject matter of the information unit corresponding to an underlying selectable region, or a word descriptive of the criterion by which information units are arranged along an axis.
The methods described above for configuring and displaying computer-based information are believed to provide multiple advantages to a consumer of the information. For example, in some embodiments the consumer may establish one or more continuum arrangements of information units, so that the information is organized in a way that makes sense to the consumer. The consumer would therefore know how the information is organized, allowing more rapid access to a desired piece of information, or information unit. The method of using a GUI to form an arrangement of information unit icons may provide a particularly simple, intuitive way of configuring information units.
Even in embodiments for which the information is not configured by the consumer, use of the above-described method for displaying information may allow rapid observation by a viewer of the intended organization of a collection of information. For example, the use of visible indicators which identify information units corresponding to selectable regions underlying a pointer is believed to allow the content and organization of a three-dimensional configuration of information units to be efficiently ascertained. The criteria used in forming such a three-dimensional configuration may also be observed in embodiments for which a visible indicator characterizing the criteria for organization of information along an axis is displayed when a pointer is positioned over the axis. Display of a current position icon may allow a relationship between the currently displayed information unit and the organization of the collection of information to be readily ascertained, and display of other icons and/or a path between positions of selectable regions previously selected may provide further understanding of the viewed information in the context of the overall collection of information.
In addition to allowing improved knowledge of the intended organization of a collection of information, the method of displaying information may also greatly enhance the ability of a viewer to rapidly select a desired piece of information, and to readily xe2x80x9cjumpxe2x80x9d from one piece of information to another. Because any of the information units are available for selection by selecting the corresponding selectable region arranged about the displayed set of axes, the viewer is freed from following a preset path between information units, as is often required in applications or web sites having a hierarchical structure. The above-described methods are therefore believed to allow a significant reduction in the time required for a viewer to identify and access a desired piece of information.
The methods described herein are believed to be useful in many situations involving display of information. One such situation may involve platform management. xe2x80x9cPlatform managementxe2x80x9d generally refers to ensuring the effective operation of application programs, systems, or networks on one or more xe2x80x9cplatformsxe2x80x9d, where a platform refers to a specific hardware configuration and/or operating system. Platform management may be particularly challenging in systems or networks including multiple heterogeneous platforms. Such systems may also be referred to by other terms, such as xe2x80x9cmultiple heterogeneous systems,xe2x80x9d and management of them may also be called, for example, xe2x80x9ccross-platform management.xe2x80x9d Platform management of a multiple heterogeneous system may often involve remote management of at least some parts of the system, and failure detection and reporting become increasingly important with increased system complexity. As an example of application of the methods described herein to platform managment, a system administrator for a computer system may arrange multiple system and network quantities to be monitored into one or more continuum arrangements. The value of such a system or network quantity at a given time may correspond to an information unit in such an embodiment. Various criteria could be used for establishing continuum arrangements in this case, such as relevance of the information unit to the health of a particular application program or likelihood of the information unit to indicate a failure within the system. Innumerable other types of information collections, such as results of an Internet search, web pages collected in a web site, collections of electronic mail messages or values of some quantity of interest (e.g., a stock price) as a function of time, to name a few, may also be configured and displayed using these methods.
It is noted that the methods described herein may be advantageously combined with the methods of grouping information for display and setting display preferences described in related application xe2x80x9cEstablishment of Information Display Policy for Diverse Display Devicesxe2x80x9d by MacPhail, filed on even date herewith, and hereby incorporated by reference as if set forth herein. This application includes methods of setting policy for display of information units, including establishing groups of information units and priority sequences of information units. This setting of display policy may be particularly advantageous for viewing information on a small-display device, so that the information most important to the viewer may be quickly and efficiently forwarded to the display device. As an example, in some embodiments of the methods described herein, the information units may be larger than will fit on the display screen of a small-display device such as a telephone or PDA. This could be the case if an information unit is a web page, for example. In such an embodiment, the information units could be broken down into smaller sub-units, and the sub-units could be configured for display by setting display policy as described in the above-mentioned related application.
In addition to the methods described above, a computer-usable carrier medium is contemplated herein. The carrier medium may be a storage medium, such as a magnetic or optical disk, a magnetic tape, or a memory. In addition, the carrier medium may be a transmission medium, such as a wire, cable, or wireless transmission path along which the program instructions are transmitted, or a signal carrying the program instructions along such a wire, cable or wireless transmission path. In some embodiments, the carrier medium contains program instructions executable on a computer system for implementation of the methods described above, while in other embodiments the carrier medium may contain a data structure or rules database containing a continuum arrangement of information units or policy for forming such a continuum arrangement.